That Was Williamsburg, Folks.

Goodbye to Marlow & Sons

I’m at the point where restaurant and bar closings can still get me down, but they rarely shock me. The one-two punch reading that Williamsburg restaurant Marlow & Sons and the Greenpoint bar Pencil Factory were both closing actually knocked a little wind out of me. Pencil Factory was always the most reliable watering hole in the neighborhood, and possibly the last of its kind that I actually liked stopping into when I took the G train to Nassau Ave. I suppose in some ways it’s not shocking that it’s closing given how expensive I’m sure it is to operate anything on that corner it occupies, and never bothering to give into any of the boozing trends the bar outlasted (fancy cocktails, 100-page beer menus, natty wine) probably means it didn’t quite hit with some of the newer locals that filter in and out of Greenpoint once they realize it can be a pain in the ass to get anywhere from there. It’s still sad. I’ll miss guarding my drink from spilling on those wobbly-ass tables.

Marlow & Sons is a whole other ballgame. When that place opened in 2004, I’d been living in the neighborhood a year, and another friend of mine echoed a sentiment that I couldn’t quite put into words when he told me it was “the first place I ever felt comfortable going into with a tote bag over my shoulder.” I understood exactly what he meant, it really was another time when a canvas sack over your shoulder was often a sign of either Upper West Side old or Brooklyn broke. But Marlow & Sons felt like it belonged in the neighborhood, and it catered to the new crop of early gentrification residents who’d get priced out within a decade as much as it did the Manhattanites who dared to take the L train into Brooklyn, where they no doubt expected to find people shooting smack on every stoop and a fire burning in every trash can. Andrew Tarlow and his partner at the time, Mark Firth, knew what they had to do to open a successful place in Williamsburg. They’d already had some luck with Diner, which opened in 1998, literally a different century from what the neighborhood is now. Before that, Peter Luger was the reason anybody ventured into Williamsburg to eat, and I don’t think it was the tourist trap it has become in the last 20 years. DuMont was the only other place I knew of that people from the East Village or Chelsea asked me about in the early-2000s, and that eventually closed after especially tragic circumstances.

Looking back now, Marlow & Sons was the shape of restaurants to come over the next decade or so. The way it looked and felt, with all that wood everywhere and the vibe that you could show up to eat, drink, or do both, was nice and easy. It’s really the last place besides Roebling Tea Room (which opened a year later but closed in 2017) that felt like some sort of scene restaurant, the sort of place that was the aughts Williamsburg equivalent to an Elaine’s in the ‘70s or Indochine in the ‘80s. You’d go to those places and you got why people were so obsessed with talking about Williamsburg as some sort of brand. Everybody looked great, ironic mustaches and Karen O haircuts were all over the place, and the idea of an Apple Store or Whole Foods opening up was treated as some sort of silly rumor. To be honest, I even made fun of living in and hanging around the Bedford and Lorimer L stops, but what I wouldn’t give to get a little bit of that energy back instead of going through life feeling like scoring a shit time reservation on some app at an overhyped concept is going to be some soul-shaking experience.

Marlow & Sons was the first time I ever engaged in Williamsburg people watching. It was something I did plenty in Manhattan, but I was more interested in looking away in my neighborhood; I didn’t want to see who was showing up because it signaled what the place was becoming. When I did open my eyes and look around, I’d see all sorts of people on the precipice of making…something. I think I can recall customers like the young artist who supposedly had impressed a member of Blur so much that the guy bought everything in the gallery; one of the dudes that worked at the coffee shop who had some CD-R of their band TV on the Radio; another person talking about how their band was going to be featured in New York Press in a very We’ve made it tone; a few younger fiction writers I knew because I’d seen them read live; American Apparel models, coke dealers who’d go on to be the first people you’d ever hear mention “cryptocurrency,” half the staff from Beacon’s Closet, and some young actor or playwright who just had their first big role or play. Alison Roman posted on Instagram how it was the first restaurant in New York City she ever fell in love with; another friend of mine recalls it as the place one cast member of Lena Dunham’s HBO series that took place in the area “insisted his whole friend group leave because the only women at the bar that night hadn’t seen Girls.” It was that sort of place.

As funny as it sounds, I tend to try to fight back against getting nostalgic about my own experiences. I’m nostalgic as hell, but usually about things I didn’t directly experience. I tend to consider my own existence to be one long, mundane march towards whatever. But when I think about Marlow & Sons and that little era it came out of, a time when it really felt like the world was either over or everything was coming to an end, I actually find myself more hopeful than anything. Man, those times were rough. Being alive at the start of the new century was a trip, but being young, broke, and not knowing much of anything then was scary. I’m nostalgic for it in part because I didn’t take it in enough and enjoy it as it was happening, but I’m also nostalgic because what I do remember was how the good times often blocked out the bad. Marlow & Sons felt real when not much else felt right, and I’m hopeful that we’ll find our way back to that sort of feeling again.